Cloud computing is one of those technologies that has suffered from misperceptions and audience ignorance of what it does and does not entail. A survey conducted last year found that almost half of IT pros felt the trend toward cloud computing solutions in the enterprise significantly increased the risk of data leakage.
A private cloud is as secure as you make it, but with incorrect assumptions out there, it's a safe bet that those IT pros won't be adopting a cloud computing setup any time soon -- which is a shame, because they are missing out on a lot of savings, efficiency and productivity gains by shunning the cloud.
If you want to keep running dedicated application servers or having to manually configure resources every time an intensive task requires additional compute resources, be our guest. But if you want to move into the 21st century, and in the process reduce costs, reduce your server sprawl, optimize your storage systems, deploy services faster, help your users, and optimize your platforms, the cloud is your best bet, and there is a safe way to get there.
The easiest and most straightforward way to move to the world of the cloud is by adopting a basic virtualization strategy. That's because a cloud computing environment inherently requires a virtualized system – but, at the same time, being virtualized does not necessarily turn your IT environment into a cloud system. You can use virtualization just to get your feet wet with basic functions like server or storage consolidation.
The basic concept of cloud computing is that resources are not tied to a dedicated server. A perfect example is email. In your firm, you likely have dedicated a server or servers for Exchange. If the server goes down, so does company email.
Cloud-based mail providers like Google and Yahoo don't have such an issue. That's because every time you log in to Gmail or Yahoo Mail, you aren't logging into the same physical server. It's spread over a floating pool of servers, and if one goes down, the service remains operational because another picks up the slack. Only rarely do those services suffer outages, and when they do they are usually symptoms of a very large system failure and they are brief.
That is an example of cloud-based services, and to do it, you need virtualized systems. So by embracing virtualization, you are taking the first and safest steps toward cloud systems.
"From a technology perspective, the cloud doesn't exist without virtualization," says Charles King, president of the consultancy Pund-IT. "The whole concept of the cloud as an infrastructure is that it leverages virtualization to make sure workloads are properly distributed on the right systems, and after a workload or app finishes, those server and storage resources go back into the pool so they can be utilized for other jobs.
"You could almost call the private use of virtualization 'cloud-on-training-wheels' as it were, or a way of dipping your toe into the water. It makes the methodology of public cloud more transparent and understandable. Once you learn the concepts it translates over to cloud computing."
In many ways, it simply becomes a matter of scale, since public and private clouds are usually built and deployed on a larger, more complex scale. King points out that people and companies with a solid understanding of how virtualization works are typically much more ready for the cloud.
From there, of course, things get more complicated, such as deciding what sits where, where data will reside, what is on the public cloud vs. the private cloud, and so forth. Companies looking to deploy a private cloud need to determine what it is are they looking to get out of the cloud in the first place, then find a provider that uses a similar platform as their own, says King. Trying to deploy on different or incompatible platforms can only create unnecessary complexity in an already challenging situation.
For more information, see:
Protecting Users With Virtualization
Faster Implementation: The Real Benefit of Cloud Computing?
Server Consolidation With Virtualization
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